Talk:Very Bad Deaths

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I'm moving this here, so that people might mine it for information. It has some useful text once you rip out the opinions and dericive language. I think it says something that it was originally written by an annoymous IP writer, who didn't even know enough about writing in Wikipedia to use the {{spoiler}} template, but "rolled their own". Badly.

This is an excellent example of how not to write a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is not a place for personal reviews. That is what Blogs are for.

At the beginning of the novel, we meet Russell Walker, a newspaper columnist who has retreated to his home, on a small island near Vancouver, Canada, after the death of his wife. Russell is depressed; he's trying to work up the courage to committ suicide when his old college roommate, Zandor "Smelly" Zudenigo, knocks on his door. Zandor, it turns out, is a telepath, and has recently, inadvertently read the mind of a man named Allen who is planning to torture and kill an entire family in a particularly gruesome way. Only such a thing could have forced Zandor out of his self-imposed isolation, as he is unable to turn his telepathy off and being around other people is at best unpleasant for him. He essentially cures Russell's depression and sends him off to recruit allies from among the authorities.

The problem, of course, is that the essential piece of evidence was gained through a means that few will believe--and those who will would want to capture, enslave, and study Zandor for his unique talent. Russell manages to convince a single officer, Nika Mandic, of the truth of the problem, and the two of them set out to try to find the killer, as they don't know his last name or much about him. Unfortunately, they manage to alert their target, who shows up at Russell's home and, with laughably little trouble, captures Russell and Nika and incapacitates Zandor pretty much through the evilness of his mind alone. Zandor finally kills Allen by "[making] himself forget about himself", using his telepathy.

The problems with this are not in the outline but in the details. Allen, for one, is completely and utterly unbelievable. Yes, Spider makes a nod in the direction of probability with a comment that if the odds are a billion to one, that means there are six of them; still, a villan who is wholly evil is not, in the end, a character which makes easy the suspension of disbelief.

Then there's Russell, Spider's latest mouthpiece. A kneejerk liberal like his creator, Russell makes even other liberals cringe. Spider appears to have forgotten that fiction is not the place for politics--and for philosophy only if you can make it interesting, which it appears he can't.

The book is scattered with flashbacks to Russell and Zandor's college life, including how Russell met and married his now-dead wife. Though paradoxically the most interesting parts of the book, one wishes that the flashbacks had been arranged differently. Though he uses the interleaved storyline technique to great effect in Mindkiller, Spider's grasp of it here is far less sure.

The problem of finding Allen, as presented, is ludicrous. Zandor knows the man's first name, that he is very wealthy, and that he got that way by writing computer software. One wonders why a Google search was such an insurmountable problem...

And last, we have the appalling moral cowardice of Zandor himself. Having learned of Allen's terrible (and completely unfeasable, but we digress) plan, Zandor does not set out to find the man and kill him from a distance; instead, he recruits allies, allows them to be subjected to huge amounts of trouble and pain, and then finishes off the job himself anyway. He explains that he promised himself he would never again kill anyone in the way he kills Allen; this is why he waited until the last possible opportunity to do so. The idea that such a horrible person's death might be worth more than his own principles never appears to cross his mind. Worse yet, the author appears to think that this choice is not only acceptable, but preferable.

Vedexent 13:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)